Archive for category Fantasy Sports

I’m going to pick five poker players for the $1,100 main event this weekend at Canterbury Park. You can pick five players as well, and if your team wins, AND beats my team, you win 1% of my action in the tournament. First place should be around $80,000, so you could win $800 in this challenge with no investment.

The Basics

You can not choose any of the members of my team

One entry per person

Entrants must tweet their picks and include my twitter handle @foxpokerfox in the tweet before the start of Day 1A.

Entrants must also tweet “Everyone should follow @foxpokerfox on twitter” before the start of Day 1A

My team consists of myself, Matt Kirby, Blake Bohn, Kou Vang, and Ryan Hartmann. In the event that one or more of these players does not play, my alternate is John Hayes. All six of these players are off limits for your picks in this contest. You don’t get an alternate. Tough shit.

That’s it. If you finish with the highest score, including beating my team, you win 1% of my winnings in the event. If you finish with the highest score, but I don’t cash in the event, you win a Running Aces t-shirt and a gold* Running Aces card protector.

Scoring

All players who cash in the event will earn points for their team. Points are determined by subtracting the player’s finish position from 51 and then doubling it. So (51-FP)*2 = points. If you pick the winner, that person will be worth 100 points. Second place will be worth 98 points. Only players who cash will earn points. In the event of a tie, the 1% prize will be split among the winners.

I will announce my score once all of my players have finished. You will have to calculate your own score, and tweet it including my twitter handle @foxpokerfox, within 48 hours of the end of the event if you think you have beaten me. In the event of a dispute I will make the final decision as to prize distribution.

Some Thoughts

If it looks like I have taken all of the good players, check out the list in this blog post and you will see that there are an awful lot of good players left to pick from. Sure, I stacked the deck in my favor, but I can do that since I’m offering a free roll. A team like Lance Harris, Everett Carlton, Matt Alexander, Todd Breyfogle, and Erick Wright stands a very reasonable chance of beating me, and that’s just a quick bunch of names off the top of my head. There are probably at least 20 players that are in the same league as the players I chose for my team, so I think there is a good chance that someone will beat me, though it depends on the number of entries.

The Fine Print

This contest is void if it is illegal in the state of Minnesota. I would be very surprised to find out that it is illegal, but just in case. In no way should anything in this blog post be construed to mean that I will be giving away more than 1% of my winnings. One entry per household. I reserve the right to cancel or modify this contest any time before the start of Day 1A just in case things go sideways for some reason.

I’m working on a list of all the players who play major tournaments with any consistency in Minnesota to that people can play fantasy poker in Minnesota. I’m not advocating illegal gambling, I just think it would be fun.

Keeping track of a fantasy draft would be easy with twitter. Alternating picks via tweet for a regular draft, or if you were just drafting a group, or assigning some sort of salary cap, then using a hashtag would work fine. A tweet like –

I’ll take Kirby, Fox, Blake, Kou, and GStacks #FPCDRAFT

would cover the process of making an official record of your picks in a normal draft or a salary cap league. All we need for that type of league is a list of all the players who tend to play most bigger buy-in events. This would work fine for single large events.

For an entire tournament series the draft could be run the same way, but owners would be required to track their own players by checking results online. It wouldn’t be much work, and the possibility of sleeping a score from a member of your team would just be part of the game. I would recommend that anyone playing the events be required to own themselves on a team to prevent the possibility, as silly as it seems, of someone taking it easy on an opponent because they own them in a fantasy league.

I thought about assigning a salary cap number to each of the top 30 or 40 players, but I think the controversy would be a hassle and I don’t want people mad at me because I gave them a low salary cap number. If I can come up with a way to get some top players together to create salary cap numbers by voting then I could tell everyone that I voted for a higher salary cap number for them and avoid the hassle, but I don’t know if that will happen. I might be able to put up a poll of some sort on the site and let the public vote for salary cap numbers, but for now I’m going to avoid the salary cap idea completely.

All I need now is to complete my list of names and then I’ll put them on a dedicated page here on my site. Hopefully you, the reader, can help me with that. I didn’t want to list every poker player I could think of, because people may actually be drafting from this list and they won’t want to scroll through three hundred names to find the best players. I tried to include anyone who was a well known player, had strong results in the last year, or who plays all the higher buy-in events in Minnesota, but I am certain that I missed some people.

If I missed you, it’s not because I don’t think you are important, I just didn’t run across your name. If you think someone is missing from this list, please let me know in the comments. After a week or two I’ll reorganize it and put it up on a dedicated page where it will always be available.

I don’t play traditional fantasy sports because I don’t feel like I have time to be checking my waiver wire and arranging trades all week long, and I know that if I got started playing I would spend way too much time on whatever leagues I joined. I’m just too competitive and I don’t have that much time to spare.

I have started playing weekly fantasy sports online instead, and I’m having a ton of fun with it. I’m even considering spending some more time learning and starting to play weekly and daily fantasy sports online as a part time job. Though I knew a lot of former online poker pros have started playing daily fantasy for extra cash, I had not looked into it until a few weeks ago when I was lucky enough to work with one of the world’s best fantasy sports players and learn a little about how it works.

I’ll still be writing mostly about poker in this blog, because it will be my full time job for the foreseeable future, but I’m also going to start writing about the learning process as I start playing more fantasy sports and how to make money playing them online. I’m just getting started, but what I have learned so far makes online fantasy sports look like a really good way to make some extra cash.

Why I Like Online Fantasy Contests Right Now

1. Online fantasy sports are legit. Fantasy sports got a carve out in the UIGEA, meaning that it is essentially sanctioned by the federal government. This means that you can deposit with any debit or credit card or via paypal, and more importantly it means that the sites aren’t going to be shut down by the Department of Justice.

2. While most people will lose money as they do with any type of gambling, the rake isn’t too bad and the games are definitely beatable.

3. You can play from your phone. I can definitely see tens of thousands of players setting their line ups whenever they have a few spare moments.

4. It’s possible for good players to put in a huge amount of volume. When I was playing online poker, I had to be in attendance, playing the games, and I had trouble playing more than ten tables at a time. Once you know how you will value players for the week’s games, you can set a lineup in a minute and then go on to the next contest. “Set it and forget it” means that you can play hundreds of fantasy competitions every week.

5. The players are awful, and smart people are going to start to figure that out and flock to the games. The games are like online poker in 2003 when nobody knew what they were doing, and for a few more years they will continue to be soft.

6. Players fled online poker because they lost money and thought it was rigged. This got really bad after Neteller left the US market and players were forced to reload when their money was gone rather than cash in and out at will. There is no worry that these contests are rigged because you can see your picks and make your decisions based on the same information everyone else has, and players won’t feel like it’s rigged because they will deposit and withdraw regularly and they won’t keep records to see that they are losing.

So far I have found that many of my opponents are lost, and the information needed to win looks like it’s easy to get in lots of places. I’ve deposited on five sites to screw around on each one and see where the best action is, but so far I really like Star Street for ease of use and a wide range of contests. You can be playing 30 seconds after you register for the site, and they offer an initial freeroll so you don’t even have to deposit right away.

I’ll be posting reviews of each of the sites as I learn about them. If you decide to check out Star Street, please Click Here to sign up and I might actually make a few bucks from this blog.